Ceph S3 Multi Site Active Active Storage & DR

Data lost can put an enterprise operation at high risk. The sources of disaster could be equipment failure, power outage or cyber attack, natural disasters. Disaster recovery solution can help enterprise protect their important data safely in different locations and keep operation uninterrupted. Active-Active multi-site can even minimize the recovery time objective (RTO) and to recovery point objective (RPO).

RTO and RPO are used to evaluate the disaster recovery solutions. The recovery time objective (RTO) is the targeted duration of time and a service level within which a business process must be restored after a disaster (or disruption) in order to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in business continuity. The recovery point objective (RPO) is the maximum targeted period in which data might be lost from an IT service due to a major incident. The RPO gives systems designers a limit to work to. For instance, if the RPO is set to one hour, the system has to backup data more than once every one hour. (Wikipedia)

Ceph is a leading open-source distributed software defined storage platform. It supports Active-Active multi-site storage cluster for Amazon S3 compatible object storage disaster recovery. Multiple clusters located in different locations can be configured as zone groups and each zone group can have multiple zones. Data are synchronized to all Ceph clusters in the zone groups whenever there is any data changed in any site.

In a normal condition, data can be written and read at each site through Amazon S3 or OpenStack swift compatible RESTFul API.

If there is a disaster happened on secondary zone B, the application can continue its service on site A without any configuration change. After the site B is back to service, data changed during the site B was fail would be automatically synced to site B.

If the site A failed, application could continue its read/write on site B. The only limitation is that creating new buckets and users are not allowed. Administrator can choose whether keeping the current situation or promoting site B to be master zone.

Ceph multi-site operation can minimize the RTO and RPO to zero at reasonable cost. The configuration of multi-site Active-Active cluster is sophisticated through the command line interface. When a disaster happens, the enterprise IT administrators want to keep the object storage service working without any downtime and data lost. An easy to operate tool is mandatory for this critical task. Ambedded technology has integrated the management of multi-site DR into his web-based UI UVS manager. It automates everything you need. Creating multi-site gateways, promote secondary site as master, S3/swift user manage and key management are easy with just moving your mouse. Managing the fail-over or fallback within a minute.

Ceph Software Defined Storage (SDS) Appliance, with easy use GUI, powered by ARM micro server cluster in a box to support object storage, block storage and file system and OpenStack Swift, Cinder, Nova and Glance.